[cody]

Originally Posted by nKoan

I believe the strut tower brace is not only for lateral distance, but vertical distance (or lack thereof).

A STB with hinges will acomplish the first goal, but not the second.

According to the link I posted earlier:

Figure 1 shows the forces of interest in a strut bar analysis. For this calculation only horizontal forces need be considered. There are of course vertical forces, but since the sum of forces must independently equal zero in both the horizontal and vertical directions, we can concentrate on just the horizontal forces in this analysis.

and...

What a strut bar does is tie the two strut towers together so that they share the load applied at the outer tower. This gives you twice as much material to deal with the same cornering force and helps reduce fatigue stress in this area.